Incoming: Live Nina
A new set offers highlighs of the incandescent singer, songwriter and pianist's performances at the Montreux Jazz Festival
Speaking from the stage of the Casino Montreux in 1976, Nina Simone told her audience that she’d decided to stop performing on the jazz festival circuit. “I will sing for you,” she said, adding “after that I will graduate to a higher class. I hope…you will come with me.”
That vow, part of a wild and intense performance that’s been widely available for years, turned out to be short-lived: Simone returned to Montreux in 1981, 1987 and 1990. On May 28, highlights from those concerts will be released on the 2-CD The Montreux Years.
As was standard practice at the storied festival, performances were captured in multi-track by a mobile sound truck. The audio quality is exceptional, offering an especially detailed picture of Simone’s resolute voice as it changed, over decades, from fervent and powerful (her first appearance, in 1968), to wise and weathered (her last, in 1990).
More a survey than a deep dive, this compilation – and another one devoted to Montreux performances by Etta James that comes out the same day – offers insight into the show business aspects of live jazz performance. At times, Simone renders a familiar theme like “The House of the Rising Sun” as though taking it apart line by line, to lead listeners into an entirely different understanding of the tune. But then she’ll lighten up and become more of an “entertainer” – singing “What A Little Moonlight Can Do” with breezy assurance, transforming “See-Line Woman” into a sustained, multi-dimensional exploration of rhythm.
For Simone and many other performers, European festivals like Montreux provided a foundation for sustained (and lucrative) international touring. They did not always inspire hall of fame evenings, however; performers have on occasion been reluctant to share recordings of festival appearances for artistic reasons. That’s not an issue for Simone: This highlight reel makes the argument that to fully appreciate the ways she evolved, as both a singular voice and performer, we might need access to all of her documented performances. In their entirety.
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